Recent Posts
-
Silicon Valley: A Living History
May 6, 2024
-
And Yet, We Go On
April 22, 2024
-
It IS Happening Here
February 16, 2024
-
General Ludd to General Intellect
January 11, 2024
-
Temporal and Geographic Edges
December 26, 2023
-
The Root of All Evil
October 13, 2023
-
Post-Pandemic Melancholia . . . Same As It Ever Was?
September 3, 2023
-
Chronicle of Deaths Foretold
June 24, 2023
-
Reparations is the Least We Should Do
May 11, 2023
-
We Are Not Alone
April 9, 2023
|
The new documentary about Argentinian workers banding together to take over their abandoned factories, The Take, is playing here at the Red Vic. Naomi Klein is the writer, and her husband Avi Lewis is the director. It’s a very good film, and well worth seeing. But I didn’t love it through and through for two basic reasons.
One, I think it embraced a Spielberg-ian emotionalism that bugged me. And two, it compellingly illustrates the confusion and difficulty facing workers who slowly decide their only course is to “occupy, resist and produce” (the slogan of the Argentinean movement), but fails to contextualize the self-management movement either in terms of Argentinean history (anarcho-syndicalism was a powerful movement in the early 20th century), or in terms of the problems of self-management as the ultimate co-optation of workers’ energy back into reproducing capital.
Continue reading “Taking” self-management seriously
The new documentary about Argentinian workers banding together to take over their abandoned factories, The Take, is playing here at the Red Vic. Naomi Klein is the writer, and her husband Avi Lewis is the director. It’s a very good film, and well worth seeing. But I didn’t love it through and through for two basic reasons.
One, I think it embraced a Spielberg-ian emotionalism that bugged me. And two, it compellingly illustrates the confusion and difficulty facing workers who slowly decide their only course is to “occupy, resist and produce” (the slogan of the Argentinean movement), but fails to contextualize the self-management movement either in terms of Argentinean history (anarcho-syndicalism was a powerful movement in the early 20th century), or in terms of the problems of self-management as the ultimate co-optation of workers’ energy back into reproducing capital.
Continue reading “Taking” self-management seriously
After some gray days Critical Mass rode last night. It was a fine ride, somewhere between 600-1000 people, depending on who you talk to. I had people tell me it was much larger than they expected, others the exact opposite. As always with San Francisco’s Critical Mass, expectations are all over the map. I got there at five after 6 o’clock and we left about 15 minutes later, heading straight up Market Street. It’s one of my pet peeves that you can always tell when strangers or newcomers are leading the ride because we go straight up Market Street, no turns and no stopping, which causes unnecessary gaps in the ride, and manages to block nearly every bus line in town for up to a half hour. We meandered up Market without any deviations, a very pleasant crowd full of conversation, tinkling bells and generally jubilant energy. For an old geezer like me, doing this ride every month since it began in 1992, I can see that a new generation is now filling our ranks. Kids who were 5 or 7 or 9 when we started are now the dominant population.
Continue reading Feb 05 Critical Mass and “Self-Management”
|
|
